Deconstructing Poetry

I am ashamed to admit it but I have always hated poetry. Perhaps hate is too strong; I just want nothing to do with it, cannot sit through it, and just don't get it. Does that make me an uncivilized goon? My problem is that I'm not sure what makes a poem a poem. I fear it's those funny, broken lines that could be sentences if you strung them together and added some decent punctuation. It seems like if you write prose in oddly parsed sentences, suddenly it's a poem. For example, I could write, "just this afternoon the sun finally came out and it warmed up enough for the snow in my neighborhood to begin melting." If I wanted to make it a poem, it would look like this:

Just this afternoon

The sun finally came out 

and it warmed up enough 

for the snow 

in my neighborhood 

to begin melting.

Anyway, thanks to a friend who found my dislike of poetry abominable and thus worked tirelessly to bring me around, I discovered a poet I love. In case you are also a goon and do not read poetry much, you might have missed him. His name is Billy Collins and his work is glorious. I hereby present one of my favorites from his book entitled "Picnic, Lightning." In the book it is printed in those distracting, broken up lines to look like a poem, but I post it here in prose for your enjoyment:

I chop some parsley while listening to Art Blakey's version of "Three Blind Mice," and I start wondering how they came to be blind. If it was congenital--they could be brothers and sister--and I think of the poor mother brooding over her sightless young triplets. Or was it a common accident, all three caught in a searing explosion, a firework perhaps? If not, if each came to his or her blindness separately, how did they ever manage to find one another? Would it not be difficult for a blind mouse to locate even one fellow mouse with vision, let alone two other blind ones? And how, in their tiny darkness, could they possibly have run after a farmer's wife-- or anyone else's wife for that matter? Not to mention why. "Just so she could cut off their tails with a carving knife," is the cynic's answer, but the thought of them without eyes and now without tails, to trail through the moist grass or slip around the corner of a baseboard, has the cynic who always lounges within me up off his couch and at the window trying to hide the rising softness that he feels. By now I am on to dicing an onion,which might account for the wet stinging in my own eyes, though Freddie Hubbard’s mournful trumpet on “Blue Moon,” which happens to be the next cut, cannot be said to be making matters any better.

(I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's Version of "Three Blind Mice" by Billy Collins)